CHIEF NURSING OFFICER | Barbara Riley, Rhode Island Hospital and Hasbro Children’s Hospital
Barbara Riley, senior vice president for patient care services and chief nursing officer for Rhode Island Hospital and Hasbro Children’s Hospital, has been deeply involved in clinical work at Lifespan Corp. But these days, health care data is on her plate.
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Riley, who has been chief nursing officer since 2008, began her 40-year career as staff nurse in 1979 at Day Kimball Hospital in Connecticut. She joined Lifespan’s Rhode Island Hospital and its pediatric division, Hasbro Children’s Hospital, as a director in 2002, taking on a number of leadership roles over the years, including the hospital’s responses to The Station nightclub fire in 2003 and swine flu, as well as managing clinical planning for RIH’s new emergency department in 2005.
Today her job is less hands-on.
“Thanks to a new partnership with GE Healthcare, we are using its health care analytics expertise and our patient care expertise” to identify and implement ways to improve and facilitate high-quality care for patients moving through the hospital system, Riley said.
Although the partnership just launched this year, resulting changes are coming, she said. Next month, RIH and HCH will implement an evidence-based use of telemetry – cardiac monitoring outside of intensive care units.
“Monitoring is extremely expensive, time-consuming for nurses and leads to ‘alarm fatigue,’ ” Riley said. “This [one improvement] will reduce unnecessary alarms and the cost of care and will get patients into beds faster.”
Riley and Dr. Sajeev Handa, chief of hospital medicine at Rhode Island Hospital, are co-leading a systemwide revamp – initially at the 719-bed hospital and eventually throughout Lifespan – to address the challenges incurred by increasing demands for limited patient space and capped or declining reimbursement rates.
Those challenges include the rising cost of health care and increasing patient demand for limited beds and resources, since the hospital is not planning to expand, she said.
As a member of RIH and HCH’s executive team, Riley oversees more than 2,450 staff members. She has created a professional practice model for nurses and has elevated the stature of professionally trained nurses in a collaborative model of care, said Margaret M. Van Bree, RIH and HCH president.
To that end, Riley said, “I try to hire good leaders [who] tap into excellence in staff, and create structures and supportive environments to help nurses.”
She created an organizational structure supporting that professionalism, with unit-based nursing councils that address issues, evaluate quality scores and create staff-level ownership.
“We include [nurses] in decision-making about patient care … give nurses the authority to do what they’re trained to do,” said Riley, noting the respectful, collaborative relationships among and between RIH and HCH’s nurses and physicians.
Twice each month, Riley and Deborah Coppola, associate chief nursing officer, host breakfast and lunch roundtable discussions with staff nurses from different specialties, which nurtures networking across disciplines.
“We bring up the elephant in the room. We don’t just get positive feedback,” said Riley. “We explain the reasons and rationales for decisions so that they don’t seem arbitrary or capricious.”
Under Riley’s leadership, nursing excellence has been recognized. “Through Barbara’s leadership, three units at RIH [and] HCH have received the national Beacon Award for nursing excellence,” Van Bree said.
The cardiothoracic intensive care unit was the first such unit in New England to win a Beacon Award from the American Association of Critical Care Nurses for exceptional patient care and healthy work environments. The medical-surgical unit was the nation’s fourth such unit to be so recognized. The pediatric intensive care unit is one of a few such units nationally to twice receive the Beacon Award.
The frequent recipient of leadership awards, Riley is a “great example of a service leader … there to help others be successful,” Van Bree said. “She’s a lifelong learner. She just recently finished her doctorate while working full time. She helps people focus on what’s most important to our patients and families.”
